Word: acsr
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...ACSR meets twice a year with a subcommittee of the Corporation called the Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (CCSR). On April 4, the entire ACSR joined the four-man CCSR for breakfast at the Faculty Club, expecting an hour and a half of ethical dialogue. What took place was closer to a briefing on Corporation policy. The discussion, as always, was extremely civil. The ACSR, through Professor Salmon, expressed its dissatisfaction with the Corporation's current policy. Hugh Calkins '45, the chairman of the CCSR, reiterated the Corporation's stance, and indicated that the Corporation wanted to avoid using ethical...
After the meeting with the CCSR, the ACSR's examination of the South African issue only became more urgent and far-reaching. The ACSR met every week between late February and the first week of May. At nearly every meeting the Committee would first dispose of the five to 10 shareholder resolutions to be voted on by the Corporation and then resume its ongoing discussion of investments in companies operating in South Africa...
...divisions among the ACSR's members often displayed more complex and deep-rooted foundations than this simple liberal/conservative split suggests. The liberals on the ACSR seemed to share a healthy mistrust of the motives of large corporations and a belief in the primacy of moral considerations. The conservatives, in contrast, almost reflexively supported corporate objectives and seemed to view ethical concerns as just one among a number of equally weighty factors. But beyond these general points of agreement the individuals in each groups approached the issues with many different commitments and distinctive moral vocabularies...
...youth. Some of the conservative members of the Committee knew only the language of cost-benefit analysis. In their strictly utilitarian calculations secure profits often weighed equally with considerations of simple justice. Other conservative members favored casting the issue in terms of revolution versus gradual change. Debates on the ACSR, then, often became fruitless clashes between incompatible moral jargons...
Some persuasion, however, did take place. After the meeting with the CCSR, the ACSR broadened the scope of its inquiry from the question of screening investments to the University's South Africa policy as a whole. As the Committee spent more time on the issue and examined more evidence, several members who had balked at the rigid use of the Sullivan Principles as the standard of corporate behavior and at the establishment of fixed limits on correspondence with the managements of delinquent companies accepted these positions. General divestiture became a viable topic for debate...